Realmac'sEmberForMacGetsBetterWithTheNewSmartDrawingFeature

Realmac Software, the guys behind fine apps like Clear and Analog Camera, released Ember for Mac a few weeks ago. This is the replacement for LittleSnapper, which has since been discontinued, reborn into this specific app. Ember is a Mac app that serves to be your digital scrapbook.

I did a brief review of Ember when it was released, and you can find that here. In short, I liked Ember’s simple interface that is incredibly intuitive. The application sits idly in the menu bar, ready to capture whatever you need on the screen. You could also browse the Web through the built-in browser, and subscribe to feeds where images are extracted, making for easy catches.

The biggest reason to use LittleSnapper before, and now Ember, is for the annotation tools. With Ember, there was quite a bit of disappointment as the drawing and annotation section did not have shape tools or arrows. I was also a fan of these in the original LittleSnapper, so it was a bit of a letdown to not find these tools migrated over to Ember. However, the 1.1 update today aims to ease that pain.

Ember now sports Smart Drawing, a brand new feature not seen previously in LittleSnapper. If you’re looking for shape and arrow tools, then this is the closest you’ll get. Ember will still rely on the freehand drawing tool, but now the app will detect shapes as you draw, turning your squiggles into circles, rectangles, and even arrows.

To go along with the addition of Smart Drawing, Ember 1.1 also brings improved handling of GIFs, the ability to drag images from your Finder directly into specific collections in your Ember library, and more. If you really need to know the file type of all your library images, Ember now displays that in the inspector as well.

Ember is a powerful scrapbooking and annotation tool for your Mac, and it just got even better in this update. This version 1.1 update is available for free for existing users. If you don’t already have Ember for Mac, it’s available in the Mac App Store for $49.99.